


Smile

by coaldustcanary



Series: Savior Fair [2]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Episode: s02e06 Tallahassee, F/M, First Meetings, Prompt Fic, Young Emma Swan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-02
Updated: 2016-08-02
Packaged: 2019-03-13 05:51:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13564200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coaldustcanary/pseuds/coaldustcanary
Summary: Emma doesn't trust a smile. Until she does.





	Smile

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to AO3 2016-08-02 as part of a collection of shorter works, reposted as a one-shot work 2018-02-03. This was based on the [August 2016 OUAT Positivity Challenge](http://tlynnwords.tumblr.com/post/148107745380/once-upon-a-time-positivity-project-august-2016) Day 2 prompt, "Smile".

A smile couldn’t be trusted; it could mean so many things, and only rarely did it actually mean what a smile ought.

Emma understood this as completely and instinctively as she could discern the truth from a lie – it was a skill similarly hard-won through experiencing the disappointment of hollow promises and becoming wary of the masks that monsters seemed to wear so easily. Even the so-called smiles that were neither predatory nor empty were often simply a convulsive sort of cover-up for pity, disdain, or even fear, in her experience.

People had bared their teeth or thinned their lips in her general direction many times in her life, but Emma Swan mistrusted the very _idea_  of a smile until a scruffy, sleepy-eyed young man sat up in the back of her stolen car and beamed at her from behind a dangled set of keys.

She considered a spur-of-the-moment plan for knocking him out with the fist-sized rock in her bag and weighed it against the possibility that she could effectively brandish her car jimmy as a knife, all while trying to keep the zippy Bug on the road. And yet Emma could hardly keep her eyes off her bemused stowaway passenger. He propped his chin in his hand, chuckling softly to himself, stifled a yawn, and went right back to grinning as he leaned between the seats into her space, his face – young but sun-weathered, and wreathed with laugh lines - conveying nothing less than unabashed delight as his gaze drank her in.

Emma’s alarm-sense for falsehood remained stubbornly silent as he introduced himself, chided her gently, professed to possess a possibly dubious character, and invited her out for a drink, nearly all within the same breath. He teased her, tilting his head with a cheerfully knowing expression at her discomfited responses, but he didn’t lie, not that she could tell. Neal Cassidy, he’d called himself, and it didn’t feel like a lie, even if it didn’t entirely seem like the truth, either, but Emma knew what it was like to introduce yourself, to give yourself a name – she was Emma Swan even if they no longer wanted her, after all - and have the words neither be entirely true nor entirely false, and so names hardly even mattered, in her estimation, not when the rest rang true.

Emma’s heart hammered in her chest as she blew a stop sign gawking at her passenger, and horns blared more fury than a warning, but it was the absence of the warning that usually screamed in the back of her head that frightened her when it came to this stranger. Even as her stomach had lurched with his appearance, every quick-witted word and flash of teeth in a crooked smile somehow tempted her to return both in kind, and wasn’t that strange?

The siren’s wail sent her stomach careening to the floor anew. Her strange new acquaintance muffled a groan and raked his fingers through unruly curls, flipping back his hood as the mirth slid visibly from his expression. His words turned staccato and short, and he barked a command for her to disappear the screwdriver even as he jammed the keys into the Bug’s ignition. Emma heaved a deep breath, nearly paralyzed with uncertainty as to what he would say when the cop peered into the car, and dug deep within herself to paint a smile as fake as everyone else’s on her face.

Not everyone else’s, not like  _Neal’s_  smile, which was…

…fake. His smile practically dripped false sincerity in the cop’s direction as he craned himself forward out of the Bug’s back seat and around her, even half-draping his arm over her shoulder. Emma froze as Neal pursed his lips, twitched an eyebrow, and lied casually, every word, making excuses to the dubious cop. The little snort and eye roll, the expression that said women-can-you-believe-them-am-I-right-or-what-officer was so smug and casual that she damn near did a comical double-take. She did allow her exasperation to show.

It added verisimilitude, of course, she wasn’t really annoyed at his sexist jibe.

Much.

But the cop bought it, she saw, with a lip twitch and a huffed breath of annoyance of his own, mirroring Neal’s manipulations so easily she nearly cried with relief, even as her unexpected savior clambered awkwardly out of the car’s back seat and slid in next to her. Her fear - the drop in her gut and the tremor in her breath – needed to bleed off or she’d scream or cry so she settled on snapping at him, relief turning the edge of her words sharp and cutting. But Neal was clearly only relieved, his expressive face gone slack and innocent as he brushed off her accusations and her needling, but his brown eyes watched her steadily.

Emma had the uncanny sudden certainty that he was looking for something in her, maybe the very same thing she hoped, wanted, needed to see in his own expression.

It wasn’t enough. She needed him to say what she already knew, what she’d sensed almost from the moment he’d popped up behind her, while her warnings and alarms remained silent. Breathless, she baited him with a question she already knew the answer to, and then another, waiting with her lips parted and her eyebrow lifted.

And he grinned at her, sideways and coy, but it was all the answer she wanted. He knew how to lie and had done so for her, but his smile was true, and in that moment, just for her.

For once, a smile meant what it should, and she could share it.


End file.
